Baltic Light: Art in Germany & Scandinavia. 1

Intimations of Immortality in German Landscape.

The German literary romantics comprised a group of individuals, men like Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel Brothers, and Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, better known as “Novalis.” One of their governing ideas was that God was the author of two books- the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature which could be read- to the initiated- as easily as the Holy Bible.¹These individuals were known to Friedrich; his art cannot be appreciated without understanding the ideas these men held about art and nature. The influence of the German nature poets and natural scientists was not confined to Germany however, but was felt by English counterparts such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. Often, Friedrich’s paintings appear upon the covers of books of romantic poets like Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” which is one of the most famous sustained meditations on mental growth and emotional response in the presence of nature. One could imagine Friedrich’s Landscape with Rainbow as the perfect visual equivalent of Wordsworth’s lines in the poem “The Rainbow,” - “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,”² and as Joseph Koerner says, Wordsworth and Friedrich seem to be intellectually and aesthetically compatible since he connects Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality vouchsafed to the weary traveller through the landscape poems such as “An Evening Walk” (1793), episodes in “The Prelude” 1799, 1805, 1850), and “The Excursion” (1814) with the rückenfigur principle: the figure seen from the back in Friedrich’s art.

1 In the words of Schlegel in 1798: “For my own part, the goal of my literary projects is to write a new Bible, and to wander in the footprints of Mohammed and Luther.” Cited in Joseph Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, (Reaktion Books, 2009), 31.

2 My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky:/So was it when my life began;/So is it now I am a man; /So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!/The Child is the father of the Man; /And I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural piety.”